02/10/2026 Update: Updated Pitchbook Figures

Motivation

My last workbook (sent on February 3, 2026) and analysis of Business Formation Statistics revealed three stylized facts:

1. Dividing invested/committed capital (or deal count) by population before summing across states provides a more intuitive “apples to apples” comparison. The unit of comparison is now “average state” in each category.
2. Rural areas in Wisconsin tend to outperform their rural counterparts in the “average states” constructed from other categories
3. in the Wisconsin context, descriptives suggest that the pattern in (2) is driven by metro-adjacent rural counties.

In line with point 1 above, this document makes refinements to the Pitchbook descriptives and adds the figures outlined in your email from February 5th. I augmented some of the visuals to include interactive toggles and sliders to help us further explore some of the variation driving our patterns. The other points above are addressed by

This document makes refinements to the Pitchbook descriptives per your email dates on February 5, addressing point (1) above. The other points will are addressed in seperate documents.

Figure 1: Map of Venture Capital Committed

US map of venture capital committed per 1 million residents across states, using 2015-2024 totals and fixed outlier exclusions (CA, NY, MA, Delaware).

Figure 2: Line Chart of average capital committed per 1 million residents from 2015-2024.

While Wisconsin missed some of the “Easy money” that came post-Covid (low rate environment combined with excess cash reserves from VCs under-investing in 2020), Wiscconsin’s VC capital has remained steady through the last decade when normalized per 1 million.

Figure 3: Horizontal bar chart of VC deal count per 1 million residents

Figures 3 illustrates VC deal count per 1 million residents, showing the top 10 states + WI only. Bar chart values are calculated by summing all deal between 2015 and 2014, and then divided by the population summed between 2015 and 2024. Interactive figure 3b) shows that Wisconsin Wisconsin consistently has between 19 and 24 deals per million people in a given year. The interactive version also shows that Delaware becomes an outlier later in the observation period.

Figure 3.b: Interactive version of figure 3 with year slider

Figure 4: Vertical bar chart of Venture Capital Deal Size by State

Two definitions are shown below (top 10 + WI): summed and average. Figure 4A uses summed numerator/denominator across years; Figure 4B averages year-level deal-size ratios. Both 4A and 4B show a similar pattern, but I keep both for completeness.

Figure 4C builds on 4A and 4B by providing the option to compare Wisconsin against the same groupings used in figure 2. Overall, the choice of “summed” versus “averaged” deal size doesn’t make a significant difference in trends or levels.

Figure 4A): Summed

For “Summed”, deal size = (sum capital committed) / (sum deal count) over 2015-2024.

Figure 4B): Average

For “Average”, deal size = average across year-level state deal-size ratios from 2015-2024.

Figure 4C): Interactive Version

This chart has three controls: metric toggle, states-vs-groups toggle, and a year-range slider.

Form D versus Pitchbook NVCA Report Data

Included in a seperate word doc.